New Roadmap for Filtering and the Leader's 'Wishes' of the Islamic Republic

On Sunday, December 2, Iranian parliament representatives rejected an urgency motion for the 'Regulation of Social Messaging Applications' plan. Supporters of this plan, including 95 parliament members and 22 members of the Hope faction (reformists), aimed to add this plan as two clauses to Article 67 of the Sixth Development Plan, which primarily addresses policies related to the national information network, but failed to secure the necessary votes. The 'Regulation of Social Messaging Applications' plan is currently under ordinary review by the Cultural Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. It is expected that two months after the final approval of this 32-article plan, 'all domestic and foreign messaging applications' will have to comply with it. Efforts to regulate social messaging applications have a long history, pursued in multiple sessions of the 'Supreme Council of Cyberspace' from December 31, 2016, to June 3, 2017, leading to the approval of a high-level document titled 'Policies and Actions for Social Messaging Applications.' According to Article 11 of its internal regulations, the council's decisions are communicated by its secretary after informing the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. This process was completed by August 2017, and on August 8 of that year, this high-level document was communicated to the relevant authorities. Following this communication, the Islamic Consultative Assembly sought to convert this high-level document into law, activating two bodies, the 'Virtual Space Committee of the Parliament' and the 'Parliament Research Center.' The result of these efforts is the controversial 'Regulation of Social Messaging Applications' plan. But why is this plan controversial? 1) The first controversial issue of this plan is the establishment of a 'Supervisory Board,' an entity similar to the Press Supervisory Board but broader and more targeted. This board, which has 13 members, includes representatives from institutions affiliated with or close to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic (Judiciary, IRIB, Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Propaganda Organization, Law Enforcement, Passive Defense Organization, and the Seminary), seven of whom will have relative control over the board's space. This board is 'obliged to supervise domestic and foreign messaging applications and decide on their continued operation based on the Supreme Council of Cyberspace's resolutions.' In other words, tasks that were previously scattered among the 'National Cyberspace Center,' 'Working Group for Determining the Instances of Criminal Content,' 'Deputy for Cyberspace Affairs of the Attorney General,' and judicial branches will now be decided and executed by this supervisory board, with the 'Judiciary' serving as its executive arm for enforcing the penalties stipulated in the law. One interesting penalty in this plan is monetary imprisonment or fines for those who create channels or groups in filtered messaging applications like Telegram. Additionally, individuals or entities wishing to operate effectively in messaging applications and 'create channels and groups' must obtain licenses. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is expected to announce the conditions for effective operation, but if this resolution also includes personal channels, every citizen intending to launch a channel must obtain a license. According to a report published in February 2018 by the National Cyberspace Research Institute, the number of Persian channels on Telegram had exceeded 754,000 by February 21, 2018. Even if we assume that 20% of these channels ceased operations after Telegram was filtered, based on the provisions of the new law, there are still 500,000 illegal channels on Telegram that are essentially violating the law and must obtain licenses to operate on other messaging platforms after leaving Telegram. This number sufficiently indicates the law's unfeasibility and impracticality. 2) According to this plan, 'only after the complete establishment of the national information network' and its approval by the Supreme Council of Cyberspace will the activity of foreign messaging applications be permitted. The establishment of the national information network has been on the agenda of the Iranian parliament and government since 2005 and was supposed to be completed by the end of 2016 according to the Fifth Development Plan. Iran's Minister of Communications, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, stated on March 12, 2018, that finalizing all projects related to this network would take two years, and it seems that there will be no news of the complete establishment of the national information network until at least the end of 2019. It can be said that the initiators of the plan have negated the possibility of foreign messaging applications operating in any form until further notice, ensuring that all capabilities remain entirely in the hands of domestic messaging applications. 3) Another controversial provision of this plan is the implementation of 'digital border guarding and cyber defense' centered around the 'General Staff of the Armed Forces' and approved by the Commander-in-Chief. Currently, the main controllers of internet gateways are the Ministries of Communications and Information. The Iranian Minister of Communications, who expressed his opposition to these changes on November 6, 2018, stated, 'Some believe that the Ministry of Communications and operators do not have the necessary competence to enforce sovereign regulations and filter cyberspace.' To better understand this issue, one can refer to the activities of the IRGC Intelligence Organization alongside the Ministry of Intelligence, which has gradually overshadowed the government and the Ministry of Intelligence in many security and intelligence cases. Gholamreza Jalali, head of the Passive Defense Organization, emphasized on November 13, 2018, that 'the government or the Ministries of Intelligence and Communications should not be concerned about the establishment of a new security layer alongside themselves,' stating, 'The Cyber Defense Headquarters is responsible for the country's digital border guarding, and this recent plan merely legitimizes the legal identity of this headquarters.' According to the provisions of the 'Strategic Cyber Defense Document of the Country,' which was communicated on June 10, 2015, with the approval of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic and the signature of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, the 'Cyber Defense Headquarters' operates under the 'Passive Defense Organization of the Country.' This organization has been appointed since 2013 based on a directive from Ayatollah Khamenei, and its head is appointed by the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Thus, if the plan is finalized, the Supreme Leader's appointees will gain control over both the supervisory board and internet gateways. In recent years, the Supreme Leader has frequently been quoted as saying, 'If I were not the leader, I would pursue and lead cyberspace.' The 'Regulation of Social Messaging Applications' plan can be described as a new step towards operationalizing this desire. Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been pursuing and presiding over this area since the establishment of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace in March 2011, now, with the executive arms at his disposal for monitoring and controlling social messaging applications and internet gateways, has a new roadmap to implement his wishes. This new roadmap, of course, also requires financial and logistical support, and for this reason, the aforementioned plan also proposes strange and unusual suggestions to support domestic messaging applications, including that 'the issuance of licenses and activation of mobile phones' is contingent on the pre-installation of effective domestic messaging applications. The Central Bank will grant these messaging applications licenses to use and offer 'cryptocurrency' and 'electronic payment' and 'electronic wallets,' and a 'Fund for Supporting Content and Domestic Messaging Applications' will also be established with the aim of 'strengthening valuable Iranian Islamic content.' These diverse proposals have been put forward while in the past six months, despite allocating a five billion tomans loan, five gigabytes of free bandwidth, and a 70% reduction in the tariffs for using domestic messaging applications, it was announced that government support for five messaging applications would cease, and audiences within the country still prefer to use Telegram with the help of VPNs—whose usage has tripled. This news clearly indicates the failure of the policy to localize messaging applications. On October 10, 2018, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi stated in the television program 'Dast-Khat' that in December 2017, 'one of the high-ranking officials of the country... said that domestic social networks told us they could cover 40 million subscribers today... I told him that it is great that they are confident, but their capacity is one and a half million people. He did not accept my words. When the events of December 2017 occurred, Telegram and Instagram became inaccessible, and they turned to social networks, but they did not even reach one million, and everyone faced problems. That same official called me and said, 'I have come to trust your words today that you were right, and they did not have that capacity.' Based on existing evidence, after the events of December, the Ministry of Communications acted generously and provided various financial and logistical facilities to domestic messaging applications to satisfy high-ranking officials. Despite the failure of these grants, it seems that the initiators of the 'Regulation of Domestic Messaging Applications' plan want to lay a richer table for the managers of domestic messaging applications. This is not surprising, as in Iranian politics and economics, there are many ways to waste resources; for now, the bread is in the soft war.